Member Article

EdTech startup Zzish raises £1.5m in funding

Zzish (www.zzish.com), the UK based software company founded by a former Google product manager, which lets developers and ‘teacherpreneurs’ create better e-learning apps for use in the classroom through ‘plugging into’ a multi-million dollar cloud-based platform, has closed a second funding round of £700K, smashing its original £400K target and bringing the total funds it has raised to date to £1.5m.

Backed by Leaf Investments, Europe’s leading EdTech venture fund, and Neil Hutchinson, angel investor and founder of the Forward Internet Group, the funds will be used to build out the next generation of Zzish platform and help developers create apps for the fraction of the time and cost it currently takes. A longer-term goal includes delivering an app builder for non-technical app creators to build high quality applications without writing any code at all.

Zzish, which was last year shortlisted as an EdTech 20 startup in recognition of its innovation and growth, selected as a Future 30 business at the Bett Show 2015, and also one of only two edtech startups accepted on the 2014 TechStars London program from a pool of 1,200 applicants, has a vision to grow its current user base to over 1,000 app developers, 20 million teachers and 100 million students by the end of 2021. It plans to replicate the success and penetration of Unity, the game development platform, but for the edtech app sector.

Mobile learning is an emerging $38bn market and presents an exciting opportunity for new players to create valuable businesses within the education category. Yet the vast majority of developers behind the creation of some 200,000 apps on the market today have access to only a fraction of the tens of millions of funding invested in some of today’s market-leading mobile learning apps. Zzish ‘solves’ this funding problem and levels the playing field for educational app creators by providing key infrastructure and tools. Zzish enables developers to produce high quality applications while saving them 50 to 80 per cent of time and cost. In short, it is democratising access to the advanced learning technologies for app creators and ‘teacherpreneurs’ keen to mobilise technology to improve student engagement and deliver more targeted, personalised and effective learning.

Charles Wiles, co-founder of Zzish, and one of Google’s first product managers outside of the US who helped build the first version of Android, comments: “We’re solving two problems for two related audiences: on the one side, education app developers creating apps for the classroom, and on the other side, teachers using those apps in the classroom. Our goal it to make it possible for anyone to create state-of-the-art education applications that have a real impact on learning.”

Apart from making app creation tools accessible to all, the Zzish platform incorporates a ‘teacher dashboard’ that enables any mobile learning app to be played as an engaging classroom quiz and, more importantly, gives teachers instant insight on class and pupil performance through simple colourful infographics that enables them to spot those all-important learning gaps immediately as well as track improvement over time.

Wiles continues: “Teachers are finding it harder to identify engaging applications for use in the classroom that also have a real impact on learning. A key failing of many education apps created by smaller developers is that they don’t collect data on student performance or provide teachers with a dashboard showing student performance. We give teachers a single dashboard that is consistent across any app that plugs into it and any app can do so in a couple of hours. Moreover our dashboards focus on giving teachers instant, simple, actionable insight.”

Zzish developed its own e-learning app, Quizalize, to showcase the platform’s capabilities at its optimal best. With it, teachers can create their own quizzes quickly, mobilise this in the classroom and obtain instant insight on an individual level, identifying student’s strengths and areas that require improvement. Quizalize, was ranked as the No.1 new app for schools by leading US EdTech site, EdSurge, in September 2015; 25,000 teachers from more than 100 countries have signed up to use it since launch.

Alan Maquire, partner at Leaf Investments, comments: “As Europe’s leading dedicated edtech investor, Leaf’s focus has always been on truly innovative technologies and brilliant management teams. We recognised this in Zzish from the beginning and are delighted to see the wider investment community do the same in this investment round. We look forward to supporting Charles and his growing team into a very exciting future.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Zzish .